It's always a warm, secure feeling when your call is being recorded for your safety and convenience, or you have to turn off all electronic devices for your safety and convenience. It's heart warming that Russia plans to show its passion for your safety by killing animals.

07 February 2013

(Reuters) - Vladimir
Putin fired a top Russian Olympic official on Thursday after publicly
ridiculing him on a visit to half-finished sports complexes planned for a
winter Olympics dogged by reports of corruption and construction delays.

26 July 2012

Those of us in Georgia were all considered impossible southern rubes when, the story goes, New Mexico resident Wade Miller tried to order tickets to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta was refused. It seems he gave his address as New Mexico and the Atlanta phone attendant refused to sell the tickets on the grounds that he or she could only sell domestically, and not to Mexicans.

"London Olympic organizers mistakenly displayed the South Korean flag on a jumbo screen instead of North Korea's before a women's soccer match Wednesday, prompting the North Koreans to refuse to take the field for nearly an hour."

"They said the plot had been devised by the Chechen rebel Doku Umarov, the head of Caucasus Emirate, a rebel group that seeks to wrest the Caucasus region from Russia in order to set up an Islamist state."

"The committee said surface-to-air missiles, TNT and grenade launchers were among the weapons seized."

25 April 2012

Lawrence Sheets covered the demise of the former Soviet Union for NPR. He writes his memoir in a brisk, non-academic style that's just right for the interested lay person. It's a quick read; Took me only a weekend and Monday. He includes what must be all his greatest hits, his quick trip to Afghanistan, a trip to Sakhalin Island in the Russian far east, visiting the Chernobyl exclusion zone, but I'm particularly drawn to his Caucasus reporting.

He makes my modest story on the southern Caucasus, recounted in CS&W, appear callow, and I appreciate him for it. It's exciting to get background on some of the places we visited a few years after he did, in Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia (even a tiny place we visited, Dzoroget in Armenia, athough he visited under entirely different circumstances). His coverage of Abkhazia's succession from Georgia is admittedly maybe not general interest, but I loved it.

He reported that little war along with his friend and fellow reporter Thomas Goltz, who has written his own books, and if you read their accounts alongside each other, you get a real, exciting sense of what went on at that fraying edge of the Soviet empire.

Similarly, you can read Sheets on Armenia alongside Christopher de Bellaigue's Rebel Land, (earlier post) which is set just across Armenia's western border in Turkey, for a richer understanding of the Armenian genocide question, and Sheets on Armenia alongside Thomas de Waal's richly reported Black Garden (that's what "Karabakh" means), which is set just across Armenia's eastern border in Azerbaijan for a better understanding of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Go ahead and polish off your expertise about the southern Caucasus with:

14 January 2012

- "Did you know ... the Duchy of Courland, now part of Latvia, once held Tobago as a colony?"

- "Wander through (the old town) on a winter night and you're lost in a fairy tale ... Wander through it on a Friday evening in summer, on the other hand, and you may find yourself lost in a British stag party. Ryanair has much to answer for."

- "One of Russia's best-known democrats, the first governor of Nizhny, Boris Nemtsov, tried to shake up the city ... He reopened the Nizhny Novgorod Fair.... The city did not become a merchant center. It soured in melancholy and inactivity."

- "Today Nizhny is paused, as if quietly waiting for what will happen next. But I have noticed that the number of very good poets has increased lately."

30 December 2011

Continuing the highest and best use of the internet here. You can see why people do it, though. t's a good time filler in flourescent departure halls. We're at the Ivalo airport, snowy day, about to leave Lapland for Helsinki.

You knew they'd try to get us, though. Never a good sign when you find the words "nuclear," "fire" and "contained" in the same sentence. This is, what? 70 - 100 miles from here.

10 December 2011

Looks like the definitive photo from today in Moscow. Can't say it looks like the 60,000 top end estimate I saw. Still, it looks like the good old days of the Soviet collapse. Makes me want to go back to Russia. From http://www.ridus.ru/.

When lists aren't used just as generic fluff and filler, you can discover worthy stuff, as in these seven remotest abandoned wonders on a blog called Web Urbanist. Name one other place you've learned about Dallol, Ethiopia and Múli, Faroe in the same article.

But boy, oh boy, when lists ARE used just as generic fluff and filler, you get, well, this.

No, on second thought, click on through. And see if all eight wouldn't apply to the next concert you go to, or even, say, your next trip to the driver's license renewal office. Go early and be prepared to stand in line. Hey thanks! Good stuff!

25 July 2011

No, it's not a mythical land like Phaic Tan or Molvania. Abkhazia is a silver of Georgia along the Black Sea, bordering Russia. I have a soft spot for these little forgotten slivers of land, although now that Kosovo has gotten some international recognition, I can't think of any others besides Trans-Dnestria, which lies between Romania and Moldova (Nagorno-Karabakh and Nakhichevan don't count, since neither makes pretensions to independence). Here's that story you missed about Abkhazia.

If you don't speak Russian and if you decode Cyrillic gingerly, one letter at a time, it’s not completely effortless to come up with bottled water in Ekaterinburg, but it is possible, and I bought six litres.

The kiosk, alongside a tram stop, was just big enough to be a walk-in affair, not big enough for four, let alone our steamy tensome. The boys in front argued over what beer and candy to order one each of. I motioned for six bottles way up high on a shelf and all kinds of consternation rippled through the mottled impatience behind me.

In a few hours Mirja and I would be climbing aboard the Trans-Siberian railroad to Ulan Bataar, Mongolia. We’d be a week en route, so we needed all kinds of stuff.

As soon as I had all those bottles, though, I calculated we could get everything else at the train station. Six litres of water is heavy.

Today was Labor Day in the U.S. On the edge of Siberia, autumn held full sway. E-kat's denizens plodded by cold and damp in an insistent, heavy shower. A lot of the older folks wore long coats. All day the rain beset.

•••••

Every account of coming upon the Ural mountains speaks of disappointment, and for good reason. The dividing line between Europe and Asia is just hills, really, and Ekaterinburg nestles just beyond their eastern slopes.

The Atrium Palace Hotel Ekaterinburg looked so nice on the internet that we mused back home that it had to be either German or mafia owned. Well, it wasn’t German. It was E-kat’s only “5-star,” with glass elevators and snuggly, fluffy Scandinavian bedding and BBC World on TV.

Still, it had its Russian characteristics: There was the hourly rate, Rule #2: “If you stay for less than six hours, you are charged for twelve hour accommodation.” And Rule #7: “The guests who troubled a lot before can not be allowed to stay at the hotel.” Hard to know if the guys in track suits grouped around the lobby drinking coffee were part of the problem or there to enforce the solution.

Like always, the eastern shore of Lake Baikal, the Sacred Lake, the Pearl of Siberia, was shrouded in mist all the way up above the peaks. Out on the water, in the morning, the wind cast a determined late season chill.

The captain stood broad shouldered, square-faced and hale with a crew-cut and a Reebok jacket, and I liked him right away. Not a lick of English, but he made us coffee with water from a big painted teapot below decks and offered pelmini that we coveted but politely refused. Couldn't be sure we wouldn't be eating his own lunch.

Over the weekend the jetty at Listvyanka, a bedraggled tourist town on the lake, had been packed with trinket vendors and mongers of exotic Siberian fish like omul and grayling. On Monday morning it stood deserted except for a drunken bottle recycler and three or four ships' mates and dockhands, loitering around stale cigarette butts and discarded wrappers.

The new week crept up in autumnal dampness, the clouds in stratified layers. Surveying the dock and our little ship, the Poruchik, the Gilligan's Island theme edged into my head. Ours was a four-hour tour – a simple west to east crossing of one of the world’s great lakes.

The Poruchik, white, blue and red tricolor flapping above, was a diesel-burning forty-foot cruiser with two cabins below decks and a separate galley and mess. Must have started life as a fishing boat before they'd retrofitted it for charters, with benches, tables and chairs, and there were liqueurs and vodka and a TV below.

Pine forest stretched around rocky outcrops up the hills along shore. An hour after the Poruchik set sail, we came alongside a settlement called Bolshoi Koti, the last, tenuous human imprint, and then, north for miles of lakeshore, lonely primeval forest reigned.

For some time the Poruchik aimed for a promontory that wasn’t on my map, and then swung hard to starboard for the crossing. A low blanket of gray from the west, from Irkutsk, replaced the sunshine of the last few days.

There were arrangements for later. Someone from Ulan Ude "will meet you at Kluevka (a place you are going to). This is definitely." Made it seem like the Russian Autonomous Republic of Buryatia was a foreign country, not simply the other side of the lake. And who knew, maybe it would be.

The temperature plunged when we swung away from the protection of shore and into open water, and after an hour and forty minutes, the mountains of the Ardaban Range on the far side of Baikal loomed tantalizingly close, breaking above the clouds.

Back home, imagining exotic Siberia, I naively thought it would be fun to "get out on the lake," like it would be fun to have a nice piece of candy. But out in its gray middle, Baikal slapped me humble, tossing and pounding the Poruchik to grab our attention and insist that it's a mighty inland sea. Finally, all you could do onboard was just hold on.

We ate a lunch of bread, tomatoes, sausage, cheese and onion down below, and wished we hadn't. We went out for air. When I went back down to clean up, bottles, plates and chairs littered the floor.

Eventually we made the eastern shore, and found our way into Ulan Ude with just enough time to walk to the parliament square before dark. Kids giggled at a massive Lenin head there. ("It looks really funny with snow on top.")

The hotel still employed Soviet-era floor ladies, whose job it was to mind your business. Ours drolly noted our extraordinary good fortune. Because of “environmental conference” with “important delegates” (the lobby buzzed with them), they’d turned on the hot water.

So, a day at an old Soviet hotel in Ulan Ude and a quick trip out to a Buddhist monastery. Tomorrow we’d climb onto a train to Mongolia. We’d been on the road for days. Just needed a little rest. We were battered and a little worn as we slumped into chairs after dinner and tuned in the ten o'clock news.

There was a sports report. It was interrupted by curious pictures we didn't quite understand - it was all in Russian, of course - and then sports returned. Minutes later they interrupted the sports again to show pictures of the second plane slamming into the World Trade Center.

04 April 2011

"Just like in the Brezhnev era, brigades of babushkas armed with brooms brush away the dirt on the city's central Putin Boulevard, in front of the facades of new department stores, high-rise office buildings and shops specializing in Islamic fashions. At the same time, there are increasing numbers of women who wear Islamic headscarves to avoid being punished by Sunni moral guardians. There are also few cafés left which circumvent the prevailing ban on alcohol by pouring vodka in the teapots."

03 March 2011

" ... In addition to the shooting, the terrorists blew up a ski lift at the resort, bringing down 40 gondolas. Luckily, the lift was empty and no one was hurt. Police also discovered three big bombs packed in a car at a nearby hotel parking lot, weighing in at over 150 lb of TNT. The escalating violence has stoked fears among Kremlin officials that the Sochi resort, host to the 2014 Winter Olympics, may be targeted."

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